


i was raised with my head to the sky

by verulams (finnlogan)



Series: i want to hear you speak to me [1]
Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: ...I am adding this tentatively bc i am scared. but. for TW reasons:, Fate, Magical Realism, Mental Health Issues, OT....4?, OT4, Oracles, Other, Water, Water Sex, the symbiote is a water spirit
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-10-28
Packaged: 2021-01-04 22:01:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21204773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/finnlogan/pseuds/verulams
Summary: “Come down, little darling, and lay at my breastOh come a little closer and I'll do the restI waited so long for a lover to comeAnd I, being foolish, walked in to my chest”Venom is a sea spirit, and Eddie’s been caught in a funk. Being lost is its own kind of adventure.





	i was raised with my head to the sky

**Author's Note:**

> Flexing those muscles.

Eddie is 14 years old and the creepy old lady from across the street says, “Don’t go in, you know.”

And he has no idea what she means, so he laughs a little, under his breath. “I won’t!” he says.

And she grabs ahold of his shoulder and says, “No, kid, you don’t get it.”

He blinks and makes a noise. “Wh-”

“Don’t go in.”

***

He slams back his drink. Mrs Chen tuts disapprovingly at him. The world crumbles into one acrid moment.

The guy across the hall gets laid. Eddie doesn’t. His brain is the thing that crumbles this time, and he sits down, lets the nothing take him.

Nothing takes him.

He makes a noise deep in the back of his throat and nothing happens.

He makes a noise deep in the back of his throat and nothing happens.

***

He makes a noise deep in the back of his throat and there’s a knock on the door.

“Hm,” he mumbles, quietly, pulling the blanket slightly closer to himself.

There’s another knock at the door. “Eddie!” yells a voice, and he slams upwards, body wracked with _something,_ and without even thinking he’s walking towards the door in padded footsteps that slowly reconnect him with something resembling life.

He squints through the peephole, body pressed up against the door, and-

There’s nobody there. “Huh,” he mumbles. “Trick of the… uh. Something. Whatever,” he mutters under his breath, and steps away. Might as well get some- food or something.

So he steps back again and then there’s a low rumbling from beneath, a low grumbling groaning that flits across his eyelids. He scratches at them blithely, and then- there’s a knocking at the door.

“Hello?”

And he opens the door, this time, without thinking, and then- She’s there.

The crazy crone that lived down the street, on Lake Avenue, in the suburbs he’d grown up in and the-

The witch woman. The, uh. The-

He wonders if that was an okay thing to say, now. Acceptable, even. Part of his job was- had been- knowingwhen to stop _saying_ shit. When to bite his tongue.

He’d lost his job after he’d made shit bad with Annie.

The skill had kind of dropped off after that.

The old woman standing in the door smiles at him.

“I think,” she says, warmly. “That you have a big change coming. And, Eddie,” she says, and she reaches out a hand. “You’re going to need some help.”

She’s maybe- mid-seventies, his reporter’s brain says, definitely witchy, the kind of woman that he’s seen on the streets askin’ for money but also the kind of woman he knows might have a home and a huge cauldron filled with spices. Brown eyes. Grey hair. Quiet, at rest.

“I, uh,” he says, quietly, then clears his throat. “What, uh. What help?"

And she smiles, and reaches out a hand. “Just remember, my name is Agnes, and you’ll find me again if you ask.”

She turns around, hands in front of her, and then takes one step to the left and then-

She’s gone.

...huh.

He pushes it from his mind as quickly as it had come. He pretends it never happened, which it might well not have done. He pretends that he can afford to apply for fifty dishwasher positions and get none, and then he pretends he can survive in San Francisco.

Dan says, “you need a vacation,” though what he needs to vacation _from,_ exactly, he’s not sure.Weirdly, he trusts Dan. Somehow Dan’s estimation of his health is more important than Annie’s, which he guesses is reasonable because Annie had never been too good at figuring out that shit.

So he follows Dan’s orders and heads to the sea. It’s still his city, but he takes time off, from- well, from worrying about how he was gonna get back onto the news wagon. He’s been looking for months, and there was no indication that he was even slightly likely to get back into it any time soon, so-

Maybe a break would help. Maybe.

Dan, oddly, was often right about these things.

***

It takes him a moment to force himself onto the beach. Feels alien, somehow, feels like it’s- something wrong, really, but Dan’s recommendation sits heavy on his shoulders. He grabs his sandals and looks at them for a second, before thinking better of it and shoving them into his pockets. Barefoot was the way to go.

It’s… Weird. Feels like mandatory fun. He was never very good at _anything _mandatory, never very good at when people told him what to do-

He catches himself in the lie. Come on, Eddie, he thinks. Be real. He’d always been much better in a team, much better when people could just prod him. It was when he let himself-

Well. When he let himself just, just. Sit there. Do nothing. Let the nothing take him.

That was when stuff was a problem. Doing what he did because he _should_ do it, not because he had a reason. There was only so much of circling new shitty back-of-house jobs he could take.

Thank god for Dan, he thinks, not for the first time. He shakes himself, just a little, feeds his brain back into itself in an attempt to jolt him into reality.

Blinks.

Softens.

Spreads his toes into the sand.

And then there’s a knock on the door.

(What?)

He reels around, almost tripping as he does. The sand is unsteady beneath him.

He blinks and there’s nothing there. He takes a moment, pauses, feels the sand on him and the sun beating down on him and the smog of the nearby city coalescing around his face.

There’s still nothing there.

The dull roar of his fellow beach-goers clicks against his brain and he clips back through into consciousness.

“Hm,” he murmurs. The sun is shining, clouds litter the sky, and he steps forward once, twice. The quiet slap of waves on the shore keeps him in the moment, so he steps forward again, three times, four times.

The beach wasn’t very big. Shallow, but long.

And hey, maybe Dan was right! The itch in the pit of his guts has faded away, slipping out of him without him even noticing.

He unsettles himself, walking across the sand and wobbling a little at its uneven surface.

And soon he begins to realise. “You good, Eddie?” He asks himself, staring out at the water. “You good?”

And then, without thinking, without thought or passage of time, he’s swimming. As if there had been no pause for breath, as if he had no control over his limbs, as if-

As if he’d dropped out of the moment, a flipped coin. And maybe he had, because he’s swimming _properly_, legs pumping and arms grabbing at the water in front of him, freezing water slapping at his sides and feet unable to touch the ground when he tries.

“What the fuck?” He thinks, and then it doesn’t matter because something in his brain is saying swim _down, _so he heaves a breath, treads water, and then plunges down.

“What the _shit?” _ He dives deeper, deeper still. His absent brain runs circles trying to explain what was going on, and gets nowhere.

And Christ, Jesus _Christ_, he must be far out to water now because all he can see are strange shifting shapes, eyes wide open in the water and body still hitting muscle groups with every stroke, and he’s going to have to _breathe _soon, going to have to draw _something _into his lungs at least, and his eyes begin to scrunch together from the strain and he feels himself burning, lungs tightening and body movements getting jerkier, failing, and god knows how-

**_“May I come in?” _** Comes a voice.

Eddie would blink and answer if he wasn’t clawing his way back to the surface.

There’s a tap on his shoulder and he opens his mouth to scream because nothing should be _touching him, not this deep, not-_

It makes a disgruntled sound. “**_May I come in? I can solve your breathing problem.”_**

Eddie can feel his limbs cringe up, he can feel it coming, and he thinks, oh god, is this it? 

And then he thinks, oh god. Like _this?_

And the voice says, “**_Eddie-_**“

And Jesus, maybe it _was_ like this, maybe this was how it was all going to end from the beginning, drowning in the sea after-

“**_Open your mouth and I will help!”_**

He finally, feet deep in the water, tossing and turning under waves and waves and waves, tries to heave a breath.

And there’s- movement at his lips. A texture, a plasticity, so he opens his eyes and there’s-

He opens his eyes and he’s in the middle of the sea.

He’s in the middle of the fucking sea.

(He was going to die here, screeches his brain.

**_“Never.”_** Soothes the voice.)

He opens his eyes and a shadowy _thing_ is inches from his face, less than that, an inch, half an inch, and then the weird plasticity is back, flooding into his burning lungs and suddenly-

Relief.

It spreads through him. Capillaries and nerve endings, neurons and blood vessels and DNA, it sits somewhere he hadn’t known he’d needed something to _sit. _

He opens his eyes again. He hadn’t realised he’d closed them.

“**_There,” _**purrs the voice of the weird-plastic-thing, “**_Better?”_**

And god, actually, _yeah. _The thing in front of him finally swims into focus, sliding back and forth across his field of view until it sits somewhere he can understand. It seems to know where he can see. For some reason, that seems perfectly normal to him.

He draws another breath and finds his body doesn’t ask him for another. Somehow, he breathes, and it comes through his lungs like air would.

“**_Mm,” _**mumbles the voice, placatingly. “**_I thought that might be better.”_**

He blinks again, and finally looks at the thing that had just saved his life.

It looks like it’s made of shadows, is his first thought. Physical, gloopy, textured- like shadows but _wet. _It looks like _something_, something that probably shouldn’t be however deep underwater and- and speaking to him, like some alien, a deep sea creature with too-many-and-not-enough-limbs, something primordial, oozing, clinging to the edges of an underwater vent, extended limbs and yet-

That’s not what it looks like at all.

At that, the shadowy thing shifts, and suddenly it has huge smiling teeth. Suddenly, it looks a lot less primordial. It looks less ancient. It looks modern, like the face of ever predatory man he’d ever taken down, or like the spitting hiss of Annie’s fuckin’ _cat. _

Its form is more pronounced now, less shifting. Like it’s leaning into staticity for his benefit. He squints at it and tries to figure out the form in front of him, where it starts, where it ends. Its body, if it had one, is huge. Bigger than Eddie. Bigger than anyone Eddie has ever seen.

He heaves another breath.

“**_You don’t need to do that, right now.”_**

“I know.” He responds, without thinking, air bubbling from his mouth and trailing up to the surface. He squints upwards, neck straining to get a good look. He’s deeper than he should be. Deeper than he could possibly have gotten with air in his lungs.

He tries to glance down, and his throat makes a soft noise as he feels the water rush into his ears, and expects it to flood his sinuses, trip into his nose and flip his sense of direction upside down.

It doesn’t though. It’s fine.

Huh.

The thing in front of him smiles again, sharp grey-white teeth coalescing.

He looks down properly this time, acknowledging quickly that his body seems perfectly fine occupying this weird underwater space, and notices that this-

This thing was attached to him. He spreads his arms, shoves his shoulders back.

The place where he and the thing connect is hazy, complicated, a mess of connected synapses and nerves, so when he gently moves his hands to the spot between them-

He watches absently as his fingers trace something, and the shadowy thing smiles further.

The jolt of pleasure is a surprise. He groans despite himself.

It seems to come as no surprise to the thing, which purrs its assent into his ear and says, “**_I am not a thing, Eddie,”_**

It takes a second for his eyes to refocus. He makes a garbled noise.

“What are you?” He forces out, eventually.

“**_I am you,_**” comes the- he stumbles over what to call it. “**_You can call me Venom,”_** rumbles the voice, **_“and you are mine.”_**

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me at verulamfic on tumblr and Twitter!


End file.
